Quote Unquote

Friday, December 2, 2016

The 102nd in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the June
1994 issue. The intro read:

Kinky Friedman introduced the Frisbee to Borneo, where he
ate raw monkey brains. He made his name as a country singer in the 70s with his
band the Texas Jewboys and songs like “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your
Buns in the Bed”. Now he’s a bestselling author of six wise-cracking mystery
novels featuring a former country singer called Kinky Friedman who, like the
author, keeps his cigars in a bust of Sherlock Holmes. He recently toured here
with Rita Jo Thompson, Miss Texas 1987, and told Nigel Cox, “Course, in Texas
we consider anyone a homosexual who likes girls better than football.”

WRITE ’EM, COWBOY

QU: How come you’re called Kinky?

KF: My real name is Richard Kinky Big Dick Friedman, you can
just call me Dick, if you like. Kinky came basically from my moss, which before
I got my most recent haircut looked like a Lyle Lovett starter kit — moss being
hair.

QU: And are there a lot of Jews in Texas?

KF: They’re kind of like leprechauns, there’s actually a
bunch of us, but it’s hard to pick out who they are because Jews tend to — it’s
like a survival thing, like a chameleon — get very much like the kind of people
that they’re living around. The Jews in Texas would just be these big guys with
the pickup trucks, you know, and the gun racks and everything else.

QU: One wouldn’t normally ask that, it’s just that you’re a
very Jewish Jew.

KF: Well I’m not a religious Jew. I’m not a religious
person. I believe in Tom Paine’s credo “The world is my country, to do good is
my religion”, being serious for just a small moment in time there. But being
Jewish in Texas is interesting, because you can pass for a Texan if you want. I
think both have this in common, they’re both independent-minded kind of
peoples, and both are vanishing breeds, at least the Jew and the cowboy are, I
would say. And I also like the way that they stand a little bit apart from
people, from the world as a whole, look at things from the outside in, which is
probably the most important thing I’ve learned from being a Jew. It’s real
helpful as a writer, gives you a kind of interesting slant, that a member of
the country club might not have.

QU: Texas has a wonderful musical heritage, but you wouldn’t
necessarily think of Texas as the home of country music.

KF: I think Hollywood is what did it. Even though the movies
were shot in Hollywood they all appeared to be emanating from Texas. By the
time Anne Frank found out about the cowboy, it was Texas, and that’s why she
had pictures of cowboy stars on her wall in her secret annex. The cowboy has
reached a lot further than he ever dreamed, thrown his lasso to the sky quite a
ways, to have captured the imagination of children all over the world. Texas
means something. Texas is a very progressive state and a very primitive state,
simultaneously. Makes it very, very interesting. A lot of wide open spaces, in
general and between people’s ears, and out of that sometimes comes a creative
thought, an original thought.

QU: Who’s your favourite Texan?

KF: Jack Ruby, the guy that killed Oswald. He was a very
glamorous, ﬂamboyant type, he was the first Texas Jewboy I would say, and he
kinda got a bad shake. People don’t realise, Jack Ruby was one of Hank
Williams’ last friends on Earth. Although Hank had the biggest funeral in the
world — both of his wives set out on the road immediately afterwards, calling
themselves Mrs Hank Williams, with bands, quite a tribute — nonetheless, Hank
had very few friends, and in the last few months of his life nobody would book
him, nobody would play in his band. Jack Ruby was one that stuck with him;
continued to book him, took him on trips. I believe they went to Cuba together.
I’d like to know more about that, that is something I might like to research
myself, just as a historical thing, Hank Williams in Havana.

QU: How long did your musical career last? You’re playing
some gigs on this tour, but you’re not playing so much.

KF: No. My career with the Texas Jewboys was almost exactly
as long as Hank Williams’ recording career, which was a little under four
years. Following that I toured with Bob Dylan and with Willie Nelson but that
was mostly without the band by that time. I think the really good music, the
good work is usually created by people who are under-appreciated at the time. It
makes me wonder about some of these guys like Tom Clancy or Stephen King or
Garth Brooks — they must, inside, be asking themselves, Am I really worth a
shit, if this many people like me? Do I really have much to say?

QU: What was it made you wind up that career?

KF: When ]oseph Heller said in the mid-70s that “They Ain’t
Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore” was his favourite country song, that was my
warning flag that I might not be a mainstream country artist. After that —
Damon Runyon said that all of life is six to five against. That’s basically it:
if there’s a way for people to misunderstand you, they will. Like my old friend
Doug Kenney, who started National Lampoon,
said, you’ve got to learn to roll with the bullets.

QU: What happened between the Jewboys and the books, which
didn’t appear until 1987?

KF: I was in a liberal arts programme at the University of
Texas, a highly advanced programme mainly distinguished by the fact that every
student in the programme had some form or other of facial tic. I graduated from
there, went on to the Peace Corps, and the 70s were big with the Jewboys. Late
70s the Jewboys were already on the wane, and the 80s was pretty much between
cases, as Sherlock Holmes would say. But it was out of that emptiness and that
unhappiness, I think, that I started writing. My first piece was for a magazine
called High Times, a drug magazine my
friend Ratso edited. It was called “My Scrotum Flew Tourist: A Personal
Odyssey”, about my Peace Corps experiences, and that was my first prose. Now I
think of myself more as a pointy-headed intellectual mystery writer, the
Raymond Chandler school of writer, though maybe that’s limiting, for him, or
me. . . I’m surprised that more of these clever writers in music don’t or can’t
write prose. When I was 43 I found out I could do it. There was a voice there,
I suppose.

QU: You named your hero after yourself, so I’m talking to a
character out of a book here. Do you have to walk around and be that character?

KF: That’s fatal. That’s what happened to a lot of people. I
think it happened to John Belushi, Iggy Pop — you have to be real careful with
that. You’ll die if you try to be a character. I’m very close to the Kinkster,
in the books, and most of the people in the books are pretty accurate, but
there is a casino of fiction and it’s a wonderful place, and often deals with
the truth, more often than the real world does. I often quote the old Turkish
proverb, “When you tell the truth, have one foot in the stirrups.” Because it’s
murder. But in fiction it isn’t.

Of course, I’ve been accused of not beating myself to death
inventing new characters, but why bother when you’ve got these guys? You’re
stuck with these old friends and as I’ve often said, you can pick your friends
and you can pick your nose, but you can’t wipe your friends off on your saddle.

QU: Do they mind being in the books? Was Chet Flippo pleased
with the picture of him in Lone Star?

KF: I think Chet now is pretty flattered to have passed into
fiction. You walk a close line when you’ve got a character that’s evil. I’ve
seen Chet since then anyway, he speaks to me. I spoke to the class he teaches
on writing in Tennessee, so he must be relatively ﬂattered to have passed into
the casino of fiction with Robin Hood and Sherlock and Ivanhoe.

QU: I read that something specific started you off on the
writing.

KF: Yeah, there was an incident in New York, in January ’83,
where I rescued a woman from a mugger in a bank in Greenwich Village. She was
being stabbed to death, it looked like to me, at least when I got into the
bank, so I held the guy, the assailant, until the police arrived and in the
morning there was a newspaper headline, “Country Singer Plucks Victim From
Mugger”. And the girl turned out to be Cathy Smith, the woman who’d been with
John Belushi when he died. She gave him the drugs. Well, she looked vaguely
familiar. See, I’d lived with Belushi for a while when I first came to New
York. I thought that was really weird, that out of 12 million people I would
rescue this one — not to tarnish my role as a hero at all, but that I would
rescue Cathy Smith. Tom Waits later commented that he thought that was the baby
Jesus telling me to stay away from drugs, which is possible also.

Anyway, I went home from that experience, the randomness of
it just blew me away, the whole thing, and I started writing the first book in
a Georges Simenon-like style, starting with just an address on the back of an
envelope and ﬂying by Jewish radar, never having written anything before. And
also Shel Silverstein helped, telling me, “Just write, ‘He said’, ‘She said’.
Keep it really ruthless.” That worked, for me, anyway. The voice seemed to be
there, and the characters I knew, and I loved mysteries.

I fancy myself as a sort of country-and-western Dorothy
Sayers. So it’s worked, particularly like in England, where the books are now
bestsellers, maybe because the British cherish eccentricity, I don’t quite know
why it is, but the Australians have now really picked up on it big, and I think
we’ll do well in New Zealand. Probably all that means the kiss of death in
America, but we’ll see. Americans may be coming around too — we're a little
slow out of the chute, to use a rodeo term.

QU: So you think you're a bigger star as a writer in England
than you are in America?

KF: No, we’re selling more books in America, because it’s
bigger. Remember Chandler was a bestseller in England, but he was not that big
in America until after his death. Elmore Leonard’s written how many, 60 novels?
Now somebody is finally making him a bestseller. ]ohn D MacDonald is another
great writer that went through that, and Rex Stout is another one, with Nero
Wolfe. All of those three guys are as literary and as great as the other kind
of authors that are lionised by the New
York Times, except we’ve always considered them mystery writers until very
recently.

QU: Who are your heroes in the crime-writing world?

KF: I like Robert B Parker. He and I are adult pen pals — he
commented that anybody who dots their i with a Star of David can’t be all bad.
I like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, of course, and I like Reginald Hill
and Colin Dexter. I like those British guys, and I don’t go for too many of the
smart-ass American types like myself. Chandler once said that the business of
fiction is to re-create the illusion of life, which is a rather laborious way
of saying, you forget you’re reading a book. Dick Francis does it well. Dick
Francis is a guy who doesn’t have a great deal of lyrical talent, his books are
formulaic almost, one after another, they’re pretty dry, but somewhere in there
you forget that you’re reading a book, and this is his genius.

The really good writers, Chandler, Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
Crumley, don’t write too much, they’re not real prolific. Elmore Leonard, he’s
a real pro. He’s pretty even. It’s almost incredible how long Elmore Leonard
was regarded as a pulp kind of guy. It goes back to what F Scott said: if you
write one book, you’ve written one book. If you write two books, you’re an
author. And to that I always add, if you write three books, you’re a hack.

QU: There are six Kinky novels all set in the Greenwich
Village, but the new book is going to be set in Texas.

KF: It is. Tragic mistake on my part. [Lights another
cigar.] You never take the detective out of his milieu. I hoped we could
conduct this interview without using the word milieu, or genre, but, it’s
happened.

Simon & Schuster, I signed a three-book deal with them
and they said, do two mystery novels and a, ah, real book. Forget the Kinky
stuff and the mystery stuff, and really stretch, let’s try and write a really
great novel. But Elvis, Jesus And
Coca-Cola, the first one, has done so well that now they’ve said, forget
the real book, stay with the Kinky thing. Moving to Texas was a device at the
time we thought might widen the audience, before we realised that the book was
doing real well.

When I moved to Simon & Schuster from my first publisher
the sales jumped about eight times over, it became very close to being a
bestseller in America. It would have been if they’d printed enough books — one
of those deals. Catch-22 was never a
bestseller. Sold 20 million copies, has never been a bestseller. .

An author is probably the worst person to ask certain
questions of. I’ll just point out Conan Doyle’s belief that The White Company was his great
masterpiece that the world would long remember him for. We all know that seven
people in New Zealand have read it, if that many, and seven people in North
America: that’s about it. And likewise Heller thinks that Something Happened is his great work. Bob Dylan probably has no
sense of what he’s done. So all I can do is look back down the hill and I’m
amazed that I have six books out and Armadillos
and Old Lace coming out of the chute. I think the books are getting better,
which is good, and I’m not that tired of the Kinkster where I have to kill him
off yet. When it happens it’ll be a little uncomfortable. I’m very close to the
character.

QU: I’m amazed at how you keep going.

KF: I have a brilliant pharmacist.

QU: I think I’ve just about used up my questions.

KF: And I’m fresh out of charm, Nigel, so it works out very
nicely. You’re a fine New

Zealander. I’ll give you a good-luck guitar plectrum. Did
you get one? Have two.

So here is Kinky Friedman in Dublin in 2003 performing Joseph
Heller’s favourite country song, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More”:

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The complete short stories of CK Stead in book form, as
pictured above. One of these contains some of the others, mysteriously altered:
temperatures have changed, as has a character’s wife’s name. What is the author
playing at? Some of this will be revealed soon in the Listener.

Bereavement bling is a thing, reports
Anne Jolis in the Spectator. Also,
how to preserve your loved one’s tattoos when they die. Go on, you know you
want to.

In the same issue Matthew Parris, on tour touting his new
book Scorn about abuse and invective,
makes a case for Twitter being the new Shakespeare and that we live in a
golden age of swearing. He persuasively sets Shakespeare’s “whey-faced
loon”, “obscene, greasy tallow-catch”, “You mad mustachio purple-hued
maltworns!”, “you whoreson upright rabbit!” and more alongside responses to this
tweet by Michael Gove, “We need to renegotiate a new relationship with Europe,
based on free trade and friendly cooperation.”
A twitterstorm ensued:

you are one confused bag of mince.
you boil-in-the-bag rent-a-clown.
you reprehensible spam-faced tool bag!
you back-stabbing cockwomble.
you haunted pork mannequin.

Parris reports that when he read from the book on tour, “cockwomble”
did not go down well in the rural Midlands, whereas the other c— word was fine in Chester.

Mick Hartley has three
great photos of the airship Hindenburg:
one shows its construction in 1932, one shows it in flight over New York in
1937, and one shows it crashing later that day in New Jersey: 36 people died,
and that was the end of airships.

So here are the Pretty Things in 1967 with “Balloon Burning”,
which is about that disaster, from their masterpiece SF Sorrow, the first
rock opera, recorded at Abbey Road at the same time the Beatles were making
Sgt Pepper and Pink Floyd Piper at the Gates of Dawn. This rocks
much harder than either:

Monday, November 21, 2016

The 101st in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the February
1996 issue. The intro read:

Salman Rushdie talks to Stephanie Johnson about Michelle
Pfeiffer, the invisible buildings of Bombay, the colour of his bedroom — and
his new novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh.

INDIAN INK

QU: Do you have a favourite among the books you’ve written?

SR: No. Or to put it another way, it changes all the time.
If I look at Midnight ’s Children now
I still feel very proud of it, but it’s somebody else’s book, it’s a much
younger chap’s book. When I started writing Midnight
’s Children I was about 29. Now I’m 48. The
Moor ’s Last Sigh feels a lot closer to how I’m sounding now. I’m very
proud of Harourz and the Sea Of Stories,
I have to say. I think that was a difﬁcult trick to pull off, to try and write
a book that would have some interest for both grown-ups and children. It looks
like it might be the ﬁrst of my books to be made into a movie, an animated
feature.

QU: Do you go to the movies a lot? There are a lot of
references to movies in The Moor ’s Last
Sigh.

SR: I’m very keen on movies. If you grow up in Bombay you’ve
got movies being made on every street corner. You grow up with the movies in
your blood.

QU: You were an actor yourself, weren’t you? .

SR: I never acted in a movie. When I was a student I
certainly did more acting than writing. After I left university I was so anxious
to be a writer, [yet] so desperately anxious that I might not be able to be a
writer, that in a funny way it was easier not to start, so I acted for a couple
of years after leaving university.

QU: Did you write plays?

SR: I have written one or two dramatic things, which
mercifully are lost in the mists of time, they were so dreadful. But I
discovered that I was not going to be a good actor, so I had no excuse not to write.

QU: Do you watch television?

SR: I watch television news and sports sometimes, but I
don’t watch much television as television because it’s usually very boring. I
watch the All Blacks, but who wouldn’t? Recently in England they did a
serialisation of Pride and Prejudice.
They’re always doing Jane Austen every six weeks. I watched this thing and it
was quite well done, quite polished and so on, but I thought the loss of Jane Austen’s
incredibly sharp, acid voice turned it all into a series of parties. That’s what
her books are if you don’t have the voice.

QU: They’ve made a series of Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha Of Suburbia. Do you know him?

SR: Yes he’s a very old friend of mine. We go way back.

QU: Is there a kind of solidarity among writers from the
subcontinent who live in England? Do you know Vikram Seth?

SR: I do, but he’s mostly in India. I’m not a close friend
of his. Hanif I’ve known for many, many years. He’s much younger than me, he’s
kind of my kid brother. He’s different to me in that ﬁrst of all he’s half-English,
which I’m not. Secondly he was born in England, in Bromley — he went to school
with David Bowie and Billy Idol. Bromley Comprehensive is responsible for a lot
of terrible people.

Hanif’s background is as a South London kid. Nine or ten
years ago he decided to go to Pakistan. It was very difficult for him, because
he doesn’t really speak Punjabi or Urdu or any of the other languages. He
speaks South London. His mother tongue is English.

QU: How many languages do you speak?

SR: Well, I speak English and French, and I speak Indian
languages, Urdu and Hindi. And I can understand large chunks of Punjabi and a
couple of others.

QU: Do they all overlap, those languages?

SR: To an extent they do, but not that much. They overlap at
the most colloquial level. The more complex they get, their vocabs diverge. Urdu
and Hindi overlap more than the others. In fact there’s a kind of composite language
called Hindustani, which officially doesn’t exist, but it’s what everyone speaks.
So if you go to the movies, the language of the movies is this strange amalgam,
which is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu, but spoken with a Hindi accent. It’s in
fact the lingua franca of North India, although you can’t ﬁnd a newspaper in
it. It’s a rather extraordinary fact that North India has this huge language
that actually doesn’t exist.

QU: The language in The
Moor ’s Last Sigh is something that’s fascinated me, especially the way
that Aurora talks. The way she says “proceedofy” and “killofy”. Do people
really talk like that?

SR: People don’t, no. I made it up because I’ve heard
particular people in India speak like that. People in India play with language.

QU: You don’t think you might stand accused by a politically
correct person of lampooning the Indian way of speaking English?

SR: Maybe. But that’s too bad. The fact is that the people
in India use it a lot. This book has been in India since the beginning of September
and people love the language, because everybody recognises it. It would be
awful for the sake of political correctness to have to clean up one’s act and
force everybody to speak in some terribly posh Fosterian English. It’s
something I have tried all my life to get away from, Standard English.

QU: It’s really only in the dialogue.

SR: In some of my books that kind of, let’s say,
“Indianised” English is also in the narrative voice. It’s there occasionally in
this. The narrator does have the tendency to erupt into ladies-o and gents-o.

QU: How did you manage to concentrate during the fatwa, to
be quiet enough to bring yourself down into that dreamlike state? Were you nervous
about sitting in a quiet room on your own, to write?

SR: It wasn’t nervousness. It was a question of there being
so much noise in my head that by the time I was able to clear that away in
order to then think about what I’d sat down to think about, I was exhausted.
There was too much static for a long time. It really was very difﬁcult. I was
very upset about what happened, in a literary sense. The way in which my book
was reviled, the way it disappeared inside this cloud of shit that people threw
at it. Well — it’s disappointing, isn’t it? You spend ﬁve years writing a book
and then everybody throws shit at it. Fortunately it doesn’t feel like that
now. The book showed itself to be resilient and has survived the mess quite
well.

QU: How long did it take to write The Moor’s Last Sigh?

SR: On and off, I suppose ﬁve years. And some of it for very
much longer than that. A friend of mine reminded me the other day that I’d ﬁrst
told him about my interest in the story of the fall of Granada 15 years ago.
I’d said to him then that I was interested in having that involved in some way
in a novel I’d write. The idea of a novel about a painter I’ve wanted to do for
a long time, because I became friendly, again over the last 15 years or so, with
a lot of the contemporary Indian painters.

QU: In your mind do Aurora’s paintings ﬁt into a kind of informal
school of painting?

SR: I do know what they look like. Some of them are a kind
of combination of Magritte and Velazquez’s Las
Meninas. There are tricks of sight-lines, impossible mirror reﬂections. In
the sequence of the Moor paintings the way in which the ﬁgure of the Moor becomes
more and more fantasised is similar to Ned Kelly in Nolan’s paintings. In that
series Kelly becomes more and more abstract until he’s just a square with a
slit in it.

So I pinched ideas from a lot of contemporary art in order
to create something credible for her. But a lot of her pictures just came from
somewhere, I don’t know where. I have absolutely sharp-edged, brilliant
pictures in my mind of those paintings and it’s really frustrating that they don’t
exist.

QU: Maybe you should try to paint them.

SR: I can draw quite well, but I’ve never tried oils or
anything. There are one or two writers who are good painters or sculptors. One
of the great examples is Gunter Grass. I went to visit him. He lived in a small
village outside Hamburg. He had a house where he lived and worked and then he
had another house down the road which was his art studio. It was full of the
same stuff — little boys with tin drums, eels, ﬂounders, rats. And I thought
how wonderful it must be to put down your pen at the end of a day’s writing and
fool around with the same ideas in bronze or dry-point etching, instead of with
words. I envied him that.

QU: I think it’s possible to get weary of words, sometimes,
isn’t it?

SR: Sure is.

QU: There was something I laughed at in the book — the
famous model Ina, who refused to do interviews because they would ask her what colour
her bedroom was. What colour is your bedroom?

SR: These are Ina’s questions, yes. How odd to be subjected
to them! Who is my favourite movie hero? I don’t know. Michelle Pfeiffer.

QU: That’s a heroine.

SR: Let’ s not be sexist about this. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

QU: I won’t ask what song you hum when you take a bath,
then. That was the other question. Did you do a lot of research for The Moor ’s Last Sigh?

SR: Some. I don’t have to do a lot, because India is carried
around in my DNA. Research is probably too grand a word for what I did, but I
did do some checking up. Particularly the ﬁrst part of the novel, which is in
South India, because I’m not from South India. I’ve been to Cochin many times,
and to the synagogue. It does have those blue tiles and every one is different,
although they’re not magic. The Jewish community is so small, there’s now under
40 people.

QU: You were saying that that community doesn’t have a
rabbi. How on earth did they evolve not to have a rabbi?

SR: They never had one. The community has been there for so
long. These people came from all over, some of them are Sephardic Jews, some of
them came from Iraq, some of them came from Southern Spain, in successive waves
of migration over a 2000-year period. Any member of the community can lead the
prayers. It’s really tragic. Even 40 or 50 years ago there were hundreds of
Jews there. But when the state of Israel was created all the young people left.
So it’s all the old bachelors and spinsters sitting sunning themselves toothlessly
in the lanes. It’s a very beautiful little bit, Jewtown, the part of Cochin
where they live.

QU: So it’s not your own family portrayed in this book, at
all?

SR: This one isn’t, no. I think it would be fair to say the
family in Midnight ’s Children had
more to do with my family. My mother is more the opposite of Aurora — a calm,
peaceful serene lady, who would be horriﬁed to be confused with this
foul-mouthed dragon lady. My father was a reasonably successful Bombay businessman.

QU: But he never put heroin in baby powder.

SR: No, that’s true. Nor was he getting involved in the sale
of nuclear technology to countries that shouldn’t have it. Almost all the
business corruption in the novel has not exactly happened, but it is derived
from stuff that has happened in the subcontinent over the last 20 years. So
Abraham is a kind of encyclopedia of all the crooks in India rolled into one. A
lot of the stuff that may seem to a reader who doesn’t know India to be
fantastical is actually true. Baby Softo isn’t. I made it up. I rather like it,
don’t you? Baby Soﬁo is all my own work.

There’s a passage in the book which deals with invisible
people building invisible buildings. In Bombay in the 80s the city authorities decided
they didn’t want to be bothered with all these people sleeping on the
pavements. They won a court case against various activists, who sued them, and
as a result they were able to declare that anyone who had been resident in Bombay
at the time of the last census then would have claims on the city and rights to
education and welfare, and so on. So if you had not been counted in the census
then legally you didn’t exist. The poor often fall through the net and don’t
get counted in the census anyway. So they were declared not there, literally
hundreds of thousands of people, they didn’t exist as far as the city was
concerned.

With the building boom in the 1980s they needed lots of
unskilled labour to work on these

building sites, so these invisible people got hired. Then of
course the buildings were breaking the law as well. Bombay being like Manhattan
and built on a peninsula, there were laws preventing the building of
skyscrapers. The city authorities wanted to prevent overcrowding in that
downtown area. But this was valuable real estate, so people were bribed in the
city hall to sign documents stating that these 45-storey buildings were
actually only 15 storeys high. Suddenly these buildings were invisible too.

So you’ve got people who weren’t there, building buildings
that weren’t there. This is literally true. If the reality of a country is like
this, you just write it down as reportage and then you’re accused of writing
magic realism. I don’t think there’s anything magic about my realism, I think
it’s just there.

SJ : They have these expressions now like “dirty realism”.

SR: Yes, that was invented by my friend Bill Buford when he
was editing Granta. He invented it to
describe a particular group of young American writers. It ﬁtted some of them,
the kind of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Jane Anne Phillips kind of writing.

QU: Have you read Will Self? .

SR: I have, yes. Dirty, but not realism.

QU: So who do you read and enjoy?

SR: Like most of us, I read a lot. The writers who I admired
most when I was learning to be a writer were writers like Joyce, Sterne, Gogol,
Cervantes, Beckett and Dickens. They would still be among the writers I think
of as the best.

I go through reading jags. There was a point where I got
very keen on North American ﬁction. I’m still a great admirer of Saul Bellow. I
think he’s a great writer. I’m fond of Thomas Pynchon and some of Philip Roth.

QU: What about women writers? Do you not read women writers much?

SR: I think I do. Didn’t I mention any?

QU: Not a one!

SR: I said Jane Austen, didn’t I? I like Toni Morrison a
lot. She’s a friend as well. I really thought Song Of Solomon was an extraordinary book. In a way I still prefer it
of her books. I’ve read quite a lot of Atwood, and when she’s good, she’s very
good. The writer whom I really admired, who was probably my closest friend
among British writers, was Angela Carter.

QU: Angela Carter was a seminal writer for me. I always read
and loved her, through my late teens and twenties.

SR: I think she’s getting her due now that she’s dead. And I
think it’s sad because she would have loved it. But she had great conﬁdence in
her work and she had plenty of people telling her how much they admired it. It
wasn’t as if she had no recognition, because she always did. I once had to
introduce Angie to a reading in London. It was in winter and a huge snowstorm developed,
which is not very common in London. I arrived at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith
and there was Angie at the bar and nobody came. Eventually six people arrived. She
was determined to go on, so instead of stupidly doing it in this big theatre we
went to a smaller room and drew six chairs around in a circle. She did her
reading ﬂat-out as if it were a thousand people and it was completely
brilliant.

She loved to read her stories. She had a story-reading
voice, which wasn’t like her real voice. A

strange artiﬁcial voice, much more sing-song and rather fey.
A curious, witchy voice.

Doris Lessing is someone I’ve admired for years and years.
I’ve got travelling round with me in my suitcase a proof of her new novel, which
I’m told is about to scandalise people yet again. It’s a novel about an old
lady who has an affair with a much younger man and is quite explicit, I gather,
on the subject. So Doris has got it, she’s still able to churn people up.

QU: That’s what we hope, isn’t it, that we can go on writing.
Like John Cheever, who wrote well into his 80s. One last question: is it odd,
now, to ﬁnd yourself more famous among non-readers as a celebrity rather than a
writer?

SR: If one of the few advantages of this situation is that
people will be drawn to my work out of curiosity, then fair enough. If I can
get that small beneﬁt out of seven dreadful years, then I’m happy to accept it.
Actually, mostly I don’t think about it. Fame, who needs it?

Monday, November 14, 2016

Dinah Birch reviews
Brendan King’s biography Beryl
Bainbridge: love by all sorts of means. I suggest to many writing clients
that they read Bainbridge’s later novels, which are miracles of concision. I
don’t suggest they emulate the smoking, drinking and shagging. Quote unquote:

Before the troubled attachment to Colin took over, she
started “going out proper” with a married friend (“So there we were at one in
the morning with a bottle of scotch with Clive running after me – begging me to
put me clothes on … the exact desperation in his voice floating up Hampstead
Heath – ‘Do please pull yourself together, I’m a respectable solicitor’”). […] Among
the thought-provoking connections to emerge from this rewarding biography is
the association between Bainbridge’s self‑dramatisation and the steady
discipline of her creativity. Her wilful eccentricity would sometimes disrupt
her writing, but it was also central to its distinction.

John
Freeman is grilled
by Poets & Writers about his new journal Freeman’s. Which is kind of like Granta was for the four years John edited it, but better. If ever
you see a copy, grab it. Preferably pay for it. Quote unquote:

With the release of
the second issue, have your aims for Freeman’s changed?I guess a little bit. I’m teaching a class on the journal at
the New School and doing more about the history of the journal. In the United
States in particular, the journal was attached to the growth of modernism. A
lot of little journals published writers like H. D. and Hemingway first—Ezra
Pound was basically everyone’s contributing editor—but they had a lot more
power than they had readership. All of them were attached to salons, which were
run by, or funded by, wealthy individuals. And I realized that by publishing Freeman’s this way [with each issue
accompanied by many events and readings] I’m trying to invert that scenario. I
want the journal to feel like a salon, but I also want to it also feel like an
accessible salon for readers. That if they live in Sacramento, or Minneapolis,
or Miami, or Barnes, Kansas, they can go and participate in an event. That the
pieces in the journal rise up through their storytelling. And I think that’s an
important step for literary journals—if not mine, then someone else’s—to take
forward, because I think for too long they’ve been an elitist institution.
Obviously they have small acceptance rates because they get lots of
submissions, but I’m talking more about their interaction with culture at large
and their readers and their assessment of who their readers are and can be.

The scandal
about 1MDB has not been widely reported in the New Zealand media. Or in the
Malaysian media, for rather different reasons. It was and continues to be appalling
for those of us who love Malaysia and despair at its government. This tiny detail
is trivial in the scale of the scandal, but is typical:

The funding for The
Wolf of Wall Street, the US complaint alleges, can be directly traced to
the billion dollars diverted from the PetroSaudi joint venture.

Here, via
Open Culture, is 30 minutes of JRR Tolkien reading from The Hobbit, recorded in 1952. I had to
read some of Lord of the Rings for
work earlier this year – fact-checking questions for Mastermind. I lovedthe
books when I was a kid but OMG the writing is terrible:

And here,
also via Open Culture, is four minutes of James Joyce reading from Ulysses. If ever a novel was meant to be
heard rather than read, etc. Not quite the accent I expected:

You cannot lick a woman’s head every time you mail a letter
without believing that, in some small way, she cares for you.

A friend of mine works for her. The Queen, that is, not
Tanya Gold. He reports that she is very nice, very funny, knows her stuff. I am
not sure how he will get on with her eventual successor.

Neil Hannon, who trades as The Divine Comedy and is one of the
cleverest lyricists in pop music and possibly the only son of a bishop in that
industry, talks
to the BBC about his excellent new album Foreverland. Quote unquote:

“I think when you put literary figures in pop songs it’s
mostly because it’s fun. You get to use odd phraseology, to talk about Voltaire
and Diderot. If you’re allowed to do it in novels, to talk about other figures
in the arts, or even in politics or history, why not in songs? It’s not so much
why do I do it, it’s more why can’t I? I think an awful lot of people who write
pop songs do unnecessarily censor themselves.”

Fad diets will proliferate if they have simple rules and
pseudoscience justifications to help them stick in people’s minds, but examine
them in detail and the logic falls apart. Take Paleo for instance, based on the
premise that we are not ‘designed’ to eat certain foods. Newsflash genius, not
sure if you missed the memo about Darwin and Wallace, but we are not ‘designed’
to do anything and neither is any part of the natural world. We evolved from a
random sequence of evolutionary accidents, existing only because certain
characteristics keep us marginally ahead in the arms race of existence. Nature
is not pure and benign, it has no wisdom and it does not exist to nourish us
and help us thrive. Nature is vicious, harmful and for thousands of years has
been trying to fucking kill us. In the Palaeolithic period it was far better at
doing this, with survival beyond thirty being extremely unlikely. Our ability
to control the natural world, to process and store foods and to adapt our
environment to meet our requirements is the one thing that has kept our head
above the evolutionary waters and saved us from the miserable fate that befell
every other hominid species in history.

Rob
Hosking reflects on events of the week: let’s pass over Donald Trump to get
to Paul Kelly on Leonard Cohen. Quote unquote:

I watched him and thought, that’s a way to be, that’s a way
to act, there is a road to travel. To walk in gravity and lightness, to be
serious but not take yourself seriously, to pay attention, to know that you
shall reap what you sow.

Sartorial advice from Thomas Seal, who advises
that brown shoes can ruin your career in London banking. Quote unquote:

“Bright working-class kids” lose out because they don’t know
“arcane culture rules,” Alan Milburn, the commission chair and a former Labour
lawmaker, said in an e-mailed statement. “Some investment bank managers still
judge candidates on whether they wear brown shoes with a suit, rather than on
their skills and potential.”

So here are Frank Zappa and the Mothers in 1967 with “Brown
Shoes Don’t Make It”:

Monday, November 7, 2016

From the edition of Saturday 5 November. As always,
spelling, punctuation, grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the Waikato
Times.

Food for thought

Well! It looks like the “gold old days” for tenancy-managers
and their “black” ways of removing unwanted
tenants, are being revisited these days.

One well known local firm has reverted to the use of
centuries-old methods, consisting of the blackening of tenants’ personal
character, using food supposedly given in friendship, but surprisingly, found
to be containing fatal does of high toxic material, and now their latest “song
and dance” item of illegally entering the rented premises with examples of dead
or dying small animals (cats usually) and salting these hapless corpses into
boxes of rubbish placed at strategic positions throughout the house!

(Larger animals – elephants – would be somewhat
counter-productive for the manager’s ends, although the subtleness may give
them away). Food for thought, eh?

Friday, November 4, 2016

The 100th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the
March 1995 issue: the cover featured a portrait of poet Jenny Bornholdt by Annelies van der Poel. From the first
issue we had a monthly column by Bill Manhire called “The Poetry File”, in
which he would discuss a particular poem: 24 of these columns were reprinted in
his 2000 non-fiction collection Doubtful
Sounds. For some reason Bill couldn’t do a column for this issue, but
Elizabeth Smither stepped in with this radio talk about “The Pebble Population”
from Brian Turner’s first collection, Ladders
of Rain, which was published in 1978 and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

“The Pebble Population”
by Brian Turner

The Auckland poet CK Stead has said that the poet needs to
work on himself, not the poem, and I take this to mean that to write good
poetry a poet needs to attend to his own character which will then affect the
poem in a way that mere considerations of technique cannot. And sometimes, and
perhaps this is a continuation of this idea, unspoken qualities of restraint,
scrupulous observation, scepticism — the things that are said behind and
between the lines — can be as effective as the words themselves.

This has always seemed to me a characteristic of the poetry
of Brian Turner. It is a poetry of restraint but humour, open-mindedness and
rigour, pessimism (sometimes) and warmth. It is certainly poetry that never
fools itself; the opposite of high-flown; though not without passion, it seems
to scorn vagueness.

Brian Turner often chooses subjects that resemble his own
poetic character and in “The Pebble Population” there seems a perfect blending
of poet and subject. It’s also a perfect example of his manner of working.
Listen to it as a very gentle but soundly-researched theory. Each word as it
appears on the page keeps its distance from the neighbouring word, each pebble
is separate.

It begins conversationally and casually. There have always
been pebbles. Presumably they have had a long history. And if you’ve had a long
history, pebble or human, it probably means you’ve been peaceable. Think of
those empires that collapsed by not being like pebbles. If there were wars and
sacriﬁce for pebbles, and music and revelry, they would surely have different
attitudes to it. Attitudes of not burning themselves out. A bit like Mother
Courage.

Pebbles don’t move about much, a bit like inhabitants of a
sleepy English village who think travelling 20 miles is too far. They have a
philosophy. They must mate because there are so many of them, but it’s outside
our ken. The passion of it isn’t. They suffer like us.

You can see the poem running through all these thoughts and
conclusions and discarding them one at a time. Man simply cannot be a pebble.
Then at the end there is a surprise, an O Henry twist, and pebbles and man fall
off the universe together, almost hand in hand. This is roughly what the poem
is about.

Notice how the humans in the poem appear as inferior: “we
saccharine humans” or “meeker than a brow-beaten son-in-law”. Or if we share
pebble characteristics, ours are of a more diluted kind: we are meek in this
brow-beaten way whereas the pebbles’ meekness has the virtue of stoicism.

As the poem progresses, the pebbles become heroic. This
happens after the word “philosophy”, as though something has hardened in the
pebbles themselves. Suddenly you almost see a Buddhist temple with bare bending
heads. And when the pebbles “grate together” there is a sense of the
strangeness of Eastern music.

But if this ﬂavour is there, Brian Turner always writes from
the viewpoint of Western man. You feel he wishes he didn’t have this Western
romanticism which is always threatening to break out and which needs to be kept
in control if we are to have any proper or useful understanding of nature. How
do pebbles love compared to us? Do they have a better chance of success? It
seems they may, for they take “one hell of a long time to get to know one
another”. You may notice here how the colloquial follows a summit of emotion.
In a lesser poet it might be a purple patch followed by a piece of gruffness.
Sometimes when a poem has cut loose in one place it is necessary to bring it
back to ground again. This is a feature of English itself; emotion followed by
withdrawal, a re-defining, and then it can begin all over again. After this
rather gruff stanza:

You can’t hurry

a pebble.

Pebbles

take one hell

of a long time

to get to know

one another

the lyric bursts out again just like the “unpredictable
madness of river travel” mentioned earlier in the poem, one of two methods of
pebble travel.

As the poem goes towards its end, the pebbles have become
more than pebbles. They have added human qualities, they have the faces we
would have — “stubborn expressionless faces” — if we were pebbles. At this
point the poet seems to have given in, after some resistance, the attempt to
keep his distance. He thinks how awful it is for them to be rained on:

The irony of it,

all this grief

pouring down on them.

It reminds me of the Edith Sitwell poem “Still Falls The
Rain”: “Still falls the rain/ With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is
changed to the hammer beat.” How still and stoical they are in this
“mushrooming century’? — surely a reference not just to the mushroom clouds of
atomic fallout but also to the mushroom speed of this century’s implacable
change and stress.

If this is the case, what can we learn from pebbles? The
instability of the century we live in separates poet and pebble at the end and
a detachment returns. What could we have in common? And here’s the answer: we
can all crack. For all their stillness, silence, inwardness, pebbles can be
cracked and shatter as easily as heads or hearts. Just the blow of another
stone will do it. So they are like us. So the poem that starts on an
observation ends on a similarity, which is sympathy.

Listen to the careful choice of words, the way a stone would
choose them if it spoke, but most of all to the mood — elation, identiﬁcation
working against the desire for detachment, so by the time the poem ends there has been a small revolution and
something gained. .

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

The 99th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the June
1994 issue. The intro read:

As modest as she is talented, Patricia Grace doesn’t wage
public campaigns, engage in literary debates or air her opinions on The Edge.
She simply writes fiction. “That’s what my job is,” she tells Nigel Cox.

LIVING IN BOTH WORLDS

The best writers, they say, are the. ones who concentrate on
the work. So when you ask Patricia Grace about, for example, what she thinks of
Alan Duff’s books, or for some background on her withdrawal from CK Stead’s
recent South Pacific anthology, she pauses for thought, then says carefully, “I
like to concentrate on the writing. I consider that that’s what my job is. I
leave commentary and reviewing to those who make that their work.”

You get the sense that being subjected to interviews is
something she would also like to see as being beyond her brief. A patently
sincere person, she makes a clear effort to summon a worthwhile answer to even
the most mundane question. So when you ask who she reads she says, “I’m
inclined to enjoy work by writers who write about communities and
inter-relationships within communities, whether they be family, or village or
inner-city groupings. I’ve recently enjoyed Maps
by Nuruddin Farrah, and The Kitchen God’s
Wife by Amy Tan. Writers like Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara,
Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, Michael Ondaatje, Thomas King. I like all of those.”

In the face of such an immaculate response to the basics, it
seems pushy to try for answers to more awkward questions about, for example,
the place of magic and kehua (spirits) in her work. After all, though she
presents herself with enormous modesty and (you can’t help recalling her surname)
grace, she is one of our most highly respected and successful writers. Since
her first publication in 1975, the superb Waiariki,
Grace has produced 11 further books, an outstanding achievement in itself. But
what sets her apart from most other New Zealand writers is that all her books
have remained in print. And in print they’ll stay. Her publishers, Penguin, are
in the process of preparing a uniform edition of her work.

Her reputation continues to rise; her most recent collection
of stories, The Sky People, was greeted with phrases like “a touch of magic here and a
quality of timelessness”, “goddess ability”, “to be treasured”. A fulltime writer, she says she puts
pressure on herself to always be coming up with new projects, which perhaps
accounts for what she calls the “different, experimental” qualities that
distinguish each book. But these new directions haven’t affected her
popularity; quite the opposite. Her popularity with Maori audiences is not hard
to understand, but the Pakeha audience has proved perhaps even more enthusiastic.

Grace’s writing depicts spirit presences that subtly
challenge materialist assumptions. So is there a difference between Maori and
Pakeha realities? “Yes,” she says, “I kind of live in both worlds, been brought
up in both and there’s more difference than most people realise.”

Discussing a story in The
Sky People, where a child’s boils seem to be burst by magic, she says, “There
are two ‘anecdotal’ stories within ‘Boiling’. They’re both true, things that
actually happened.”

There’s no trace of defensiveness here, no insistence,
merely a clear statement of difference. This difference isn’t the main reason
that we read her — we read her because she’s a wonderful writer — but when
Pakehas consider how they know what they think they know about Maori lives and
values, the writing of Patricia Grace must be seen, I think, as a major
influence.

At the interview’s end she gives me a card so I might ring
and check any facts. “Patricia Grace, fiction writer”, it says. Going down in
the lift, perhaps slightly disappointed not to have got anything from her on
the hot topics of the day, I reflect that she is one of the tiny handful of
people in the country who might honestly give that as their job description. A
hard-earned position, and one worth protecting.

Friday, October 21, 2016

The 98th in this occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the June
1994 issue. The intro read:

Rob O’Neill on Renato “Michael” Amato, 1928-1964. The first
in an occasional series.

Neglected Writers

If, like me, you spend a lot of time rummaging around in
second-hand bookshops, you may have come across the name Renato Amato. If
you’re not, then the odds are that you wouldn’t have.

It was 30 years this April since Amato died from a brain
haemorrhage in Wellington at the age of 35. His single volume, the collection
of stories The Full Circle Of The
Travelling Cuckoo, was posthumously published in 1967. Since then he has
been almost universally, and quite unjustly, ignored. Perhaps because of the
dominant strain of literary nationalism at the time, ironically a movement
often associated with his friend Maurice Shadbolt, Amato just didn’t seem to
fit.

Born in Portenza in southern Italy in 1928, Amato fought on
both sides during World War II. First he was co-opted into the Fascist Black
Brigade and later, using forged papers, he joined the partisans — where he saw
many of his former officers taken prisoner and executed.

Filled with a general disgust after the war, Amato tried to
build a life for himself. He attended university but did not finish a degree.
He began writing and had some pieces published. Moving to Rome, he acted,
wrote, took labouring jobs and waited on tables. He met several more-established
writers, including Cesare Pavese, but they made little impression on him.

Working for a refugee organisation in the early 50s and
learning English, Amato began to think about emigrating. New Zealand was
virtually off limits to Italian migrants so, perhaps out of some sense of
perversity, he decided that was where he wanted to go.

He arrived in Auckland in 1954 and renamed himself Michael.
Again he found a succession of jobs — labouring, selling linen door-to-door —
and virtually abandoned writing until, in 1958, he met his future wife, Sheena
McAdam.

She was a student at Victoria University and, with her
encouragement, he enrolled there himself and began writing again. Between then
and his death in 1964, Amato had numerous stories published in local literary
journals and his talent and promise began to be recognised.

To his contemporaries, Amato always seemed a writer of
another order — internationalist when nationalism was a strong force in
literature, cosmopolitan in a relatively closed and insular society, never
prepared to pander to his new countrymen’s need of positive affirmation.

Robert Chapman described him as “the one adult in an adolescent
generation”. And Maurice Shadbolt, in his introduction to Amato’s collection
(where much of this information comes from), remembered him as “contemptuous of
all special pleading for New Zealand and New Zealanders in literature”.

Another who knew him, John Parkyn, an occasional writer and
one-time editor of the Victoria University journal Argot, says he was “one of the kindest men l have ever known. But
he also loved nothing better than a good argument, taking an outrageous,
taunting position on some literary or non-literary matter. ‘Come in, Johnny
Parkino!’ he would bellow as he opened the door of his Kelburn house. ‘Why is
your country so bloody boring?’”

New Zealand and New Zealanders do not get off lightly in his
fiction either. In stories like “An Evening’s Word” he often used a fine sense
of irony to display all that was provincial, crass and hypocritical in our
society. Perhaps it was this that has led him to be little anthologised since.
Amato’s unwillingness to heap praise on his adopted country, and often his
willingness to do the reverse, hit us where it hurt the most: in our fragile
sense of national pride. We could take such criticism from a fellow New
Zealander — just — but from an outsider, a foreigner, an immigrant, it was too
much.

But in the end, the only question that really counts is
quite simple: Could he write? And the answer is equally straightforward: yes,
and very well. His recent inclusion in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Oxford Book Of New Zealand Short Stories
is totally deserved.

The Full Circle Of The
Travelling Cuckoo is, for me, one of the best collections of short fiction published in this country. It should still be read.